telegram

At the time, the Tana family was vacationing on a remote Yugoslav island when a telegram arrived: “The restaurant burned down. Call me, Pearl,” recalls Katerina Tana, one of Dan Tana’s daughters.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 14, 2026

Within hours of carrying the first telegram across the English Channel in 1850, the earliest “submarine telegraph”—27 miles of copper wire wrapped in a rubbery substance called gutta percha—was broken by a fishing trawler.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 4, 2026

The author sent a telegram to his mother back home in French-controlled Algeria: “I’ve never missed you so much.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 8, 2026

A British businessman fast running out of cash, William Knox D'Arcy, is said to have uttered those words when he received a telegram from Persia, 113 years ago.

From BBC ● Jun. 21, 2025

Papá sent a telegram to Fito, my cousin in Guadalajara, asking him to secure our birth certificates and to send them to us by mail.

From "Breaking Through" by Francisco Jiménez

Stefansson’s telegrams to the dead men’s families are perfunctory.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025

Robert Hudson, from Leyton, east London, started his career in December 1964 - aged 16 – as a messenger in the Whitechapel Delivery Office distributing telegrams.

From BBC ● Dec. 27, 2024

At its center, a young, unnamed telegraph operator watches as the beautiful, married Lady Bradeen sends flurries of telegrams, hoping that no one will notice the messages to the dashing Captain Everard.

From Slate ● May 27, 2024

According to the telegrams, the Vatican embassy sent what U.S. churches had collected from the American faithful, down to the cents: $210,400.09, allowing the vote that eventually elected Pope Pius XI.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 19, 2024

CBS and The Mercury Theatre received telegrams, phone calls, and letters that supported some of those accounts.

From "Spooked!" by Gail Jarrow

Toward the end of 1926, Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who would co-father “Citizen Kane,” telegrammed his friend Ben Hecht, the newspaperman who was finding himself between gigs and behind on his rent.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 11, 2023

Nesbit had a serious relationship with the author Donald Barthelme before she married Gilman, and one day, Barthelme telegrammed her from Europe.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 14, 2023

Hecht hailed from the quick-witted New York circles once frequented by Mankiewicz, who telegrammed his friend an oft-quoted invitation to Hollywood: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.”

From New York Times ● Dec. 4, 2020

At one point, after the mega-success of the "Ringo" LP, no less than John Lennon famously telegrammed Starr, saying “Congratulations. How dare you? And please write me a hit song.”

From Salon ● Oct. 25, 2019

Mrs. Guinea had telegrammed, "Is there a boy in the case?"

From "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath

In 1916, Charles Evans Hughes waited two weeks before telegramming his concession to Woodrow Wilson, who noted that the message was “a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”

From Slate ● Nov. 7, 2012